Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what assessment they have made of the impact of private finance initiatives on NHS hospitals' budgets in the last 12 months for which figures are available.

It is the role of NHS Improvement (and NHS Trust Development Agency and Monitor before it) to assess the impact of different expenditure items at National Health Service trusts to ensure that NHS trusts and NHS foundation trusts have arrangements in place to secure financial health. Where individual providers find themselves in financial distress, identifying the root cause of issues is often complex. In some cases the situation may be attributable to the long-term fixed costs of Private Finance Initiative (PFI) schemes, whilst in others the principal causes may lay elsewhere (although it is possible the PFI may exacerbate the issue). However NHS Improvement’s focus is then on supporting that individual provider to fix its financial problems, for example through interim financial support or longer term solutions in that health economy.

Information on the reporting of PFI payments in terms of trust’s total income and expenditure and other statutory reporting requirements is contained within individual trust accounts.